


At the Water's Edge

by OceanTheSoulRebel



Series: Escaping the Cage [4]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, friendship fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-29 17:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16269302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanTheSoulRebel/pseuds/OceanTheSoulRebel
Summary: Ilya Surana and Morrigan - a Circle mage and a Witch of the Wilds. Two opposite sides of what they begin to learn is the same coin.





	At the Water's Edge

**Author's Note:**

> Friendship is a funny thing when you've never had healthy relationships modeled around you.

“You’ve been watching me.” 

Ilya frowned slightly and set down the scrubbing rock, her fingers numb where they had been submerged in the cold water of the river. “Of course,” she replied blandly. “You’re very skilled, and your spells are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s hard not to be fascinated.” 

Morrigan knelt beside her and emptied her bag of clothes at the water’s edge. “One would expect a Circle mage to be afraid of foreign magics.” 

“And one would expect a Witch of the Wilds to be uncaring of a Circle mage’s assessment. Here.” Ilya handed her the stone she had been using. She worked a small dab of thick soap into the stubborn stain. 

“I hate the woods,” Ilya confided, when Morrigan didn’t reply. “It’s so… new. Everything hurts. My stuff gets dirty. And traveling is so inconvenient! Top it off, I miss my bed. As much as I hated that tower, at least I had a mattress of my own, and real blankets.” 

Morrigan scoffed as she scrubbed at a splatter of dried blood on her vest. “You are soft, Warden.”

“Unfortunately,” Ilya said without waver. “I am what they made me. Not all of us have the luxury of choice. Or of freedom.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Morrigan turn toward her in quiet study; her mouth twisted, as if she wished to speak, but ultimately kept her peace. They worked in silence at the river’s edge, passing soap and agitators between them, and worked through most of their scant piles of clothes before Morrigan spoke again. 

“I… find myself wishing to apologize. For earlier.” The words came out reluctantly, as if dear, hoarded. “I was wrong to speak ill of him, of you, without knowing. I… I know not what I would have done, were I you.” 

Her hands stilled in their movements. “He was like a brother to me,” Ilya said quietly. “Jowan. My first friend in the Circle, one of the very few I considered close to my soul.” A bubble of strained laughter worked its way from her chest. “He reminded me of a mouse, sometimes. Always watching for cats and traps alike. He…” 

Ilya closed her eyes against the bittersweet tears that welled. It had been just a few short weeks since Redcliffe, where she… where they had seen each other for the last time. She still shied away from the memory, but could bring herself to remember the feeling of holding him, the way he clung to her in that cell. A wry smile crested over her face, unbidden.

“Jowan was a good friend.” She took a steadying breath. “Afraid of everything but always wanting in on the fun, even when he complained. We went everywhere together, him and Anders and me; where one was, the other two weren’t far behind.” She chuckled. “Jowan, once nicked some pigment from the quartermaster somehow. I think we were, what, fifteen and sixteen, the two of us? Which made Anders almost twenty one, I think. But, he—Jowan—he and I snuck from the apprentice dorms to Anders’ room one night and spiked his hair soap with it. Anders went from golden blond to as blue as a berry when he next washed up. Didn’t talk to us for over a week!” 

Morrigan laughed, as if she couldn’t quite help herself, and Ilya smiled. “He could never really hold his magic steady,” she said. “I once thought that Anders and I became spirit healers only because the spirits knew Jowan was a mess, so we could look after him. Jowan was always ending up losing control, burning his hand, freezing his toes. He zapped a senior enchanter into a bookshelf some ten feet away with a burst of built up static because he couldn’t properly discharge the lightning spell they were working on. He was so mortified he didn’t come out of his little blanket cocoon for days between classes!”

Her smile fell away, and she turned to face Morrigan, who stared at her with curiosity. “He was—he was so scared, Morrigan.” 

Ilya shuddered at the memory.  _ You’re overreacting, _ she had said, as if that would help. 

_ They’re going to turn me Tranquil, Ilya! _ he had hissed back. _They don't_ want _to give me the Harrowing. They say I'm not strong enough, so they're gonna—they're gonna do it._ He had started to cry by then, wrapped in the shelter of her blankets.  _ Not everyone is Irving’s favorite. Not everyone can keep themselves safe in his robes, like you can. You don’t… you don’t even care, do you? _

He had stormed off from her room with that, presumably back to his bunk in the apprentice dormitory. Jowan hadn’t spoken to her again for weeks and avoided her altogether, even when Anders had finally been captured and brought back after his latest escape attempt. He had only spoken to her again to set an ill-advised plan in motion, one that destroyed everything it touched. It had been too late for any of them, and she hadn’t realized it in time.

“He was so scared of everything, by the time we—he—escaped. Said he was running out of time, and then…” she trailed off.

“And then he did,” Morrigan finished softly. “I cannot—” She shook her head and leaned back on her hands, tools set down around her. “There were few other growing up. Oh, Mother was there, of course, but she”—Morrigan made a face, soured and silly all the same—”well, she is Mother. You’ve met her, you’ve seen how she is.” 

Ilya snorted and leaned back into the damp moss that covered the ground. She gave Morrigan a contemplative look. “What was it like? The Wilds?”

“She was the most contact I had held with the outside world for ages, Mother and her tales. ‘Twas the Wilds, after all. One does not simply live there in peace; we survive. We thrive, in our twisted ways, but we do it alone. I would visit nearby Lothering just to get a taste for something different on occasion, when I knew she would not look for me, and…” 

Morrigan sighed, the sound almost wistful. “I once spent the day as a raven and lingered upon the Chantry roof. I watched the children play, calling to each other in the streets. I spied lovers taking long walks to the lake, arms linked and faces beaming. Mothers and fathers worked with babes held fast in their embrace. I watched and I—I  _ hungered. _ For what, I did not know.”

“Do you know now?”

The witch shook her head. “I am not sure I do,” she admitted. “‘Tis so strange, traveling with you and your companions.” 

“Alistair said—what was it?—oh, yeah. He said it was the one good thing about the Blight, how it brought us all together, when we first met.” Ilya thought of her companions, a motley crew of warriors, assassins, rogues, and mages. “I’m not sure he enjoys quite how right he was.”

_ “Hmphf.”  _

Ilya turned her gaze to the sky. It was always so… vast, even filtered through the canopy of the trees. The sun went its way through the clouds before her unfocused gaze. 

“I used to dream about the sky,” she said. “About walking under the sun, instead of the lamps of the tower halls. I didn’t see the outside of the tower until I passed my Harrowing and became a full-fledged mage. I remember going up to Kinloch’s gardens, on the roof, and wondering what it might have been like to live somewhere else. Anywhere else, really, it didn’t matter where. The three of us promised each other we’d do everything we could to get out; if one was able to escape, they would come back for the other two, take anyone they could from the tower.” She sighed. “It was a nice dream while it lasted.” 

“What of family?” 

“What about them? I don’t remember anyone.” The admission worked from her like gravel in her throat, sharp and ragged. “I know, logically, that I must have one, somewhere; I must have been born to someone, after all, mages don’t just pop up randomly in the countryside. The way the Sisters at the Circle’s chapel go on, we’re all the Maker’s children, all one big happy family. They said that if we were good people we would be taken to his side when we died. But surely I must have had one here, in this life. Parents, maybe siblings, a passel of sharp-eyed cousins somewhere. Maybe they lived in an alienage, or maybe I was taken from some wandering Dalish tribe. But I grew up thinking—”

She dashed a tear from where it dripped over her ear, then pressed her palms into her eyes hard enough to see stars. “I thought that if I was good—if I listened and proved myself worthy, excelled in my classes and learned the finest control over my magic—that they would tell me. That I could somehow know them, and they me, and I wouldn’t feel so…”

“Alone.”

_ “Yes.”  _

Morrigan laid back to look at the sky, herself, her hands set like pillows beneath her head. “And did they?” she asked quietly.

Ilya had been in the chapel, working her regular shift organizing sermons and books along its shelves. She remembered the surprised look on the Revered Mother's face, the way the Sisters held themselves at the question. 

She remembered the templar who answered.

_ Knife-ear and a mage? Who would want you? _ the woman sneered beneath her armor, before the Revered Mother could offer a word of explanation. 

“No,” she breathed. “No, and they took away what precious time I had to myself for weeks, for my arrogance that I could be worth more than a weapon to anyone besides the Chantry.” Ilya gestured toward the sky. “‘Think on the Maker’s love and pray for guidance and forgiveness,’ I was told, as if that would fix anything. My shift-mate in the chapel thought her magic a curse from the very same god she so desperately worshiped.”

Morrigan nearly squawked with outrage. “What a—what a sad mockery of existence! To be afraid of what makes you powerful!”

“Everything about the Circle is evil, Morrigan. The longer I know you, the more I wish I had never stepped foot in that place. If there is a Maker, then He is evil, and so is His Bride. There is no good to be found there; not even in us, as we become links in the very chains that bind us down.” 

Only when she pauses did Ilya notice her chest heaving, her face hot with rage. Her fists clenched painfully with static; slowly she counted her breaths, in and out in long, counted  measures. “But they did not win,” she said fiercely. “They could not get me to hate myself, or my magic, or other mages. They did not beat me into submission like they did so many others; many of the Templars tried their best, and tried often. I am afraid of many things, but they could not make me afraid to live. I am stronger than Kinloch Hold. _I won.”_

“And yet you saved the mages, when doing so doomed them to live out the rest of their days in that tower,” Morrigan reminded her, as if Ilya could ever forget. “You did not even slay the templar; he clearly would have killed you, had he but the chance.” 

“And you asked me flat out to kill your mother,” Ilya replied. “We all have our issues.” 

Morrigan huffed beside her. They did not speak again for some time, watching the clouds and the traveling sun in silence. 

“Perhaps,” Morrigan finally allowed, “perhaps there is more to you than I expected, Warden.”

“Perhaps indeed.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Now with editing and fleshing out the story! Originally posted to Tumblr [here](https://ocean-in-my-rebel-soul.tumblr.com/post/178929963141/you-have-been-watching-me-ilya-scrubs-at-her).
> 
> Come find me on tumblr at [ocean-in-my-rebel-soul](https://ocean-in-my-rebel-soul.tumblr.com).
> 
> Comments and concrit always appreciated! Thank you for reading!
> 
>  


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